Overview
Ah, the neighbourhood bookshop. A portal that can transport anyone throughout time and space with just the power of the words on a page. They're home to worlds unlike anything we can imagine, and precious records of all the wonderful and terrible things that have happened, or could happen, here in the real world. Entire species, languages, nations and planets that don't exist in any form other than the written word. In the digital age, these Sydney bookshops are something of a sacred place — preserving a medium that, no matter what the tech obsessives say, simply cannot be replicated.
Sydney is blessed with a great many bookshops, most of which have served readers from near and far for years, cementing their places in the city's creative community. If you're looking for your next read or need a shopping experience with more heart and what hitting 'add to cart' can offer, these charming stores around the city are the places for you.
Destination NSW
Better Read Than Dead
265 King St, Newtown
Where else would you find a charming local bookstore than on King Street? The Inner West's retail identity is one rooted deeply in both nostalgia and community, and Better Read Than Dead fits the bill perfectly. For 20 years now, this store has been a literary haven in the busy King St stretch, boasting floor-to-ceiling shelves of tomes and stories from every genre. The staff are always ready with a recommendation, just look at their Instagram feed to see how regularly they choose favourites and share reviews. And in the spirit of cultivating a community, the store offers memberships and is home to six themed monthly book clubs, which you can sign up for online.
Kieran Gilfeather
Gleebooks
49 Glebe Point Rd, Glebe
Another beloved book nook of the Inner West, Gleebooks has been in the game for decades. The moniker dates as far back as 1975, but the current Glebe Point Road store has been open since 1990, where a huge collection of new releases and bestsellers can be found alongside an impressive events program. The added benefit of those events makes Gleebooks as much a celebration of the intellectual and creative as it is a shrine to the works they've published. A monthly book club is open to anyone who buys a $15 ticket, and authors are regularly invited to discuss their books in conversation in a dedicated events space, instead of being crammed awkwardly between shelves.
Destination NSW
Berkelouw Books Paddington
19 Oxford Street, Paddington
Berkelouw Books has established itself as a literary pillar across Sydney, but the Paddington flagship store will always be special. The Berkelouw family hails from Holland, and were booksellers long before they emigrated to Australia in 1948. While the Paddington store wasn't opened until 1994, it's the oldest-operating store in the current portfolio, which collectively stocks over two million books. The Oxford Street store is a favourite for inner east readers, and doubles as a cosy cafe to keep its clientele fed and caffeinated.
Destination NSW
Ariel Booksellers
326 Oxford St, Paddington
Another beloved Paddington bookseller is also one of Australia's oldest independent stores, having opened back in 1985. The homely space stocks an impressive collection of pages and topics, but is perhaps best known for its creative collection — specialising in coffee table-compatible books on art, literature, design, film, poetry and architecture. And if you love the second-best thing a bookshop can sell (knick-knacks), Ariel has all the trinkets and doodads you could ever ask for.
Bookoccino
66 Old Barrenjoey Rd, Avalon
For the bookworms of the Northern Beaches, no store is as beloved as Avalon's Bookoccino. About an hour's drive north of the CBD and in the more secluded stretch of the insular peninsula, Bookoccino has been peddling pages since 1992, now owned by a former writer for The New York Times and the New Yorker and selling a stock of some 10,000 volumes strong. It's also a cafe, and proudly computer-free, which, as the website explains, is "a small rebellion in favour of thinking, conversation and the simple pleasure of reading."
Abbey's Bookshop
131 York St, Sydney CBD
When you're in the heart of the city, you do have a variety of stores to choose from, but one of the endearing favourites can be found on York St opposite the Queen Victoria Building. This is Abbey's, operating since 1968 as one of Australia's most premium literary retailers. On the ground floor, you'll find one of the largest in-store collections of crime fiction novels in the country, alongside children's books and a wide variety of fiction and non-fiction. Head up the stairs, and you'll find GALAXY Books, a dedicated Sci-Fi and Fantasy bookstore, and one of Australia's largest ESL book collections in Abbey's Language Book Centre.
Kinokuniya
Level 2/500 George St, The Galeries
It might be impossible to be a book lover in Sydney who hasn't heard of or visited Kinokuniya. A veritable paradise for page-turners, this Sydney CBD outpost of the Japanese-based brand has one of the largest ranges of books in the city, selling well over 300,000 titles in English, Japanese and Chinese. This is the sort of bookstore you visit when you want the shop to tell you what you want to buy. Be it travel, history, art, secondhand books, games, manga, comic books, romance, horror, film or comedy, you will never, ever have a hard time finding the title for you in Kinokuniya.
TITLE Barangaroo
400 Barangaroo Ave, Barangaroo
Part library, part criterion closet and part garage vinyl store, TITLE is the place to be for the independently inclined and constantly creative. Dealing not only in pages but in discs, TITLE has two stores in Sydney, but its Barangaroo store fills a niche of creative retail in a harbourside area otherwise dedicated to hospitality. TITLE is where you go when you want to be challenged by the shelves and surprised by what's in stock. Don't expect your average front-of-store bestsellers; these shelves are home to pieces of thought-provoking physical media that deserve to come home with you on the basis of substance, not reputation.
Gertrude & Alice Cafe Bookstore
1/46 Hall St, Bondi
Something of a escape, perfect for the occasion when the surf and sand that normally draws a crowd to Bondi simply won't do, Gertrude and Alice has long been a top choice for a cosy respite in one of Sydney's busiest suburbs. Family-owned and operated, it's a space with a rich vintage charm and the sort of store you could easily whittle away the hours in simply by browsing. If that leaves you hungry, the cafe aspect comes in handy, allowing you to crack open a new find over all-day brekkie rolls, lentil soup, Mexican eggs and more. You'll be halfway through your book before you know it.
Love Vintage Books
563 Willoughby Road, Willoughby
If vintage is what you're after, there's no better place to find it than this highly curated collectors' haven on the lower North Shore. Love Vintage Books deals exclusively in just that: vintage, hard-to-find books that are out of print or simply one of a kind. To clarify, it's not just a secondhand bookstore and won't buy your old books. Here you'll find an abundance of first-edition treasures and antique classic literature. Take the scripts of a 1950s medical drama, 1930s recounts of the great explorers, biographies published in the late 1800s or a first-edition cookbook valued at almost $1000 — these are the sorts of books you typically won't find outside of private collections.
Elizabeth's Bookshop
257 King St, Newtown
We'd be remiss to discuss Sydney's vintage book scene without including the Newtown institution that is Elizabeth's. Part of a four-store family across Australia, Elizabeth's has been a secondhand book dealer for over 50 years, with a global network of suppliers and a national stockpile that at any time measures around 400,000 titles across all its physical stores. The King St store, like a green portal into a pocket dimension of the page, is its largest Sydney outpost and home to many a hard-to-find title. It's also the origin of the now widespread Blind Date With a Book, which could be hiding your next favourite read behind a paper wrap and some extremely loose clues as to what hides within.
The Book Station
356 Port Hacking Rd, Caringbah
Down in the Shire, literature lovers congregate in the vintage haven and cafe that is The Book Station, a mix of a cafe, bookstore and community hub. The shelves are stocked with pre-loved titles, but it's not as curatorial as other shops in this list. In fact, The Book Station offers an exchange program, bring in your (undamaged) pre-loved books, and you'll earn store credit to go towards a new purchase. Since there's a cafe on-site, you could theoretically spend an entire day buying and reading something over all day breakfast and lunch menus, then return it to grab another title and rinse and repeat another day.
Desire Books & Records
3 Whistler St, Manly
Tucked away from the hustle and bustle of the main Manly Corso, visitors looking for an elusive parking space inside the Whistler St car park on a sunny Saturday will like lay eyes upon this small but mighty pre-loved bookstore. Opposite the beloved antiquities and oddities store Ooli's in a miniaturised vintage arcade, Desire Books is nothing but vintage gold. Creaky wooden floors, chalk signage and precariously packed shelves contain hard-to-find and pre-loved titles from across the worlds of fiction and non-fiction, alongside a great selection of vinyl records — ideal if you're a collector of many a physical media.
Sappho Books, Cafe and Bar
51 Glebe Point Road, Glebe
If Kinokuniya is paradise for new releases, Sappho is sacred ground for vintage and pre-loved book hunters. The three-story heritage building on Glebe Point Rd is so much more than just a pre-loved bookstore, even if it shelves an impressive 30,000 titles. Here, you can sell your own books, buy secondhand sheet music, sip on a specialty barista coffee in the courtyard, enjoy a healthy bowl or stacked sandwich or come after dark to enjoy sangria jugs in the summer, mulled wine in the winter and tapas year-round with poetry, open mic nights or live music to entertain you.
Got more vintage or shopping itches to scratch? Read our list of the best vintage stores in Sydney.
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